Recap / Voltron: Legendary Defender S2E2 "The Depths"

"Here, all are safe and warm."

Hunk and Lance end up on an ocean planet, with only Lance's lion working. Hunk reluctantly follows Lance when the latter spots a mermaid. They end up in a beautiful mermaid kingdom with a dark secret.

Tropes for this episode include the following:

• Apologetic Attacker: Lance is unwilling to fight a brainwashed Hunk but does so. When he manages to free Hunk, Hunk immediately apologizes for what he did.
• Bait-and-Switch: At first it seems that the queen is using dancing to hypnotize anyone who comes, including guests and Paladins. Then it turns out the food from the garden is hypnotizing everyone.
• Butterface:
  • Lance sees a seductive dancer behind a screen and gets excited. Then the screen falls away, and they see an octopus doing the dance. Lance looks away with a disgusted expression.
  • Inverted when one of the rebels named Plaxum, who wears a jellyfish to protect her mind, takes it off. She's revealed to be very beautiful, to Lance's delight.
• Continuity Nod: Hunk throws up after the bad crash the way he did in the pilot.
• Deadly Euphemism: Those who "take a walk through the garden" don't come back. It's later revealed that the garden is a serpentine creature that eats everyone.
• Dumbass Has a Point: As Lance mentions, if he hadn't found the mermaids, he and Hunk wouldn't have freed the civilization from a carnivorous alien, and they wouldn't have found a means to contact Team Voltron. Hunk has to admit Lance is right.
• Fighting Your Friend: Lance has this with Hunk, but he refuses to hurt him in any way.
• Fine, You Can Just Wait Here Alone: Lance tells this to Hunk when the other refused to leave his lion.
• Gory Discretion Shot: We don't see the Baku monster actually eat any of the mermaids, including the one that swims willingly to the "Garden".
• Lotus-Eater Machine: The underwater kingdom makes everyone there feel "safe and warm" after they eat some food.
• Madness Mantra: "Here, all are safe and warm."
• Mauve Shirt: Florona, the mermaid that was supposed to watch Hunk and Lance, is sent to the garden to be eaten by the Baku.
• My God, What Have I Done?: When Queen Luxia recovers from her brainwashing, she's horrified on realizing what she did while under the garden's control. She doesn't remember it, any more than Lance remembers his brainwashing, but she intuits it from how the rebel treats her.
• New Powers as the Plot Demands: As the lions tend to do, when Lance is in a bind, the Blue Lion unlocks a back mounted sonar cannon used to save the day.
• Our Mermaids Are Different: The merfolk do have strong traits of a regular mermaid, but there are some more who have more alien-like features.
• Planning with Props: Lance gets his information about the rebels plan on taking down the Queen this way.
• Please, Don't Leave Me: Hunk screams this to Lance when the other threatens to leave him alone in his broken down lion.
• Reasonable Authority Figure: The queen is this after the rebel frees her from brainwashing. She immediately restarts an old technology that allows them to contact the castle.
• Sci-Fi Writers Have No Sense of Scale: Lance and Hunk discuss the probability of coming out of a wormhole onto a planet. "...Pidge said that space is 90% empty," says Hunk. Lance says that Pidge's science is wrong. That's true, because it's a huge overestimate of matter density in the universe.
• Skipping School: Lance mentions that in the third grade he stayed home for two weeks because of a stomachache that he didn't have.
• Talking in Your Sleep: Lance mutters in his sleep, "I don't need pants, I'm a mermaid."
• The Hunter Becomes the Hunted: Lance momentarily boasts this to the Baku but immediately flees once it frees itself.
• This Looks Like a Job for Aquaman: The Blue Lion's stated boost when underwater is actually used here. Inverted for the Yellow Lion, whose earth based strengths are weakened underwater.